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- [00:02]
Sarah James McLaughlin
From the waters of Lake Erie.
- [00:04]
Brett
It was raising flags. He said there's no way that that fish should weigh 7.9 pounds. It's just not big enough.
- [00:12]
Sarah James McLaughlin
To a nondescript office building in Richmond, Virginia, home to a 700 million dollar fund for children with special needs.
- [00:19]
Brett
If there was a cliche list of how to blow money that you just stole very quickly, this guy did all of them.
- [00:27]
Sarah James McLaughlin
To the ski slopes of Salt Lake City, where a former Olympic snowboarder landed on the FBI's most wanted list.
- [00:34]
Brett
Ryan Jim's wedding is one of those interesting norcos who have had two very successful careers, One legal and one illegal.
- [00:42]
Sarah James McLaughlin
We're pulling back the curtain on a fresh lineup of opportunists who stopped at nothing to get ahead. These are the stories of people who saw a loophole, a moment of weakness, a chance to get ahead and took it. I'm Host Sarah James McLaughlin. Join me for a new season of the opportunist on May 19th. Follow now wherever you get your podcasts.
- [01:25]
Brett
I'm Brett.
- [01:26]
Sarah James McLaughlin
And I'm Alice.
- [01:27]
Brett
And we are the Prosecutors. Today on the Prosecutors, we take a look at the predation, the.
- [01:50]
Alice
Wham.
- [02:18]
Brett
Hello, everybody, and welcome to this episode of the Prosecutors. I'm Brett and I'm joined as always by my infectious co host, Alice.
- [02:27]
Alice
Well, hello, Brett. I hope I'm not actually infectious, but an infectious personality. Oh, thank you so much. And possibly an infectious disease right now. If you guys are listening to my voice, please don't give me a one star review for having a nasally voice. I know I have a cold. It's never ending, but I am here and that's what matters.
- [02:48]
Brett
Yes, yes. Alice, you know, she is the ultimate trooper. She never gives in. She keeps fighting on. So we are recording. It's actually the third time we've recorded in 24 hours, which I think is pretty impressive. I don't know, maybe it's just me.
- [03:00]
Alice
I think it's pretty impressive considering between us, we have like, you know, two newborns.
- [03:05]
Brett
Well, that's true. If we never recorded when we were sick, we'd never record.
- [03:10]
Alice
That is true. Indeed. Indeed. But also part of the reason we're recording so much is we promised you when we started this very long series, we still don't know how long it's going to be. We were going to do our best to record a ton for you guys so that we could have more episodes on hand to be able to get through this faster. I will say I'm not going to focus on reviews. I actually almost Never read them because they get me sad when they're mean. The one star reviews that are like, why is it taking them so long to record? Like, because it takes a long time to research and to physically have the hours to record these. And it's because we are not rushing through this. This case deserves a deep dive into what really happened, not what just is in documentaries, not what you've heard people talk about. Because this case is about three boys who met a brutal end. And justice can only be done if we try to figure out the truth of what happened that night.
- [04:08]
Brett
That's right. And we're in one of the more difficult parts of this discussion. The autopsies, the injuries to the boys. And last episode we went through, I guess, what you describe as the States theory. Dr. Peretti, who was the pathologist who did the autopsies for the boys and essentially said the boys were beaten to death, they were stabbed in various places with a knife, they were cut with a knife, they were drowned. You know, we're talking about the drowning yesterday and someone brought up the possibility. It is possible that my position has always kind of been that the boys went into the water either unconscious or in a very bad state and sort of drown in the water. During that period, someone suggested they could have also been drowned by the perpetrator. And that's true, that is also a possibility. You know that. But whatever happened, it was incredibly brutal and a lot of things, a lot of terrible things were done to these boys. But after the convictions, as people started to look at the evidence, they started looking at the photographs and started to think about this case, a new theory started to arise that maybe some of these injuries, not all of them, but some of them, and maybe some of the most severe injuries were not actually caused by the killer, but were in fact animal predation. These boys were in, as we know, a very sort of rural area. They were in the woods, they were in the water. There were a lot of animals in that forest and we're going to talk about them. And so this theory sort of started to arise that maybe it was predation. And so we wanted to present that you. And so you know what the argument for this is. And then in our next episode we're going to have Joseph Scott Morgan from Body Bags, who knows a lot more about this stuff than us. And he is going to walk through some of this with us. What's interesting, we have no idea what he's going to say. We didn't want to bias him at all. We sent him information he's coming on, no idea what he's going to say. So, you know, we're hopefully we're not going to look like idiots when he comes on and is like, it's obvious that it's X, Y and Z. It's the opposite of what we've been saying. But we're going to see, we're all going to learn together. It's going to be amazing. But with that, Alice, let's talk about the predation theory.
- [06:19]
Alice
So you've heard throughout the last 10 episodes sprinkled within it, animal predation, Animal predation. So what is this theory? Well, it's turtle predation specifically. So during the 1994 trials, Dr. Frank Peretti testified that the boys had been tortured with a serrated knife consistent with the, quote, lake knife recovered from the lake behind Jason Baldwin's trailer. Now that would be horrendous, right? We heard about the autopsies last episode. They were truly, truly horrible injuries, especially if they were done, say, with a knife. There was no suggestion in either trial that the wounds were caused by animal predation or human bite marks. The alternative theory offered was that the weapon could have been a knife belonging to John Mark Byers. So basically it was this is one knife or another. But back then in 1994, there was not this whole theory of animal predation yet. Now, Peretti did not give an opinion on the time of death in the Misskelley trial, but as you may remember, in the later trial for Damien Echols and Jason Baldwin, he kind of inexplicably, even though previously testified that he couldn't give a time of death, understandably because of the degradation of the bodies, after having been in water for so long, he now estimated that the time of death was sometime between 1 and 5am now, in Damien Eccles's 1998 Rule 37 hearing, criminologist Brent Turvey strongly put forward the idea that a number of the wounds on the boys were human bite marks, despite having really no qualifications in identifying bite marks at all. This version of the bite mark theory was dominant for some time, although Some experts in 1998 also testified that they believe some of the wounds were caused by animal predation. So these alternate theories didn't come about until about four years after the trial.
- [08:21]
Brett
Yeah, and so initially you have this whole bite mark thing, and it's fascinating to watch it because as we all know, bite marks, it's not as if murderers don't bite their victims. That happens. But bite mark identification has really fallen out of favor Particularly any kind of maybe you can identify a bite mark. Maybe, maybe. But tying it to any one person is going to be difficult. If you've seen Paradise Lost 2, that's what this is all about. John Marr Byers had had a lot of dental work done. I think basically all his teeth were gone. So the suggestion was he had done that to sort of COVID this up as part of his effort to get away with the murders. Later on, when John Mark Byers fell out of favor, people suggested that the bite marks looked like Terry Hobbs dental records. So it's like the worst kind of side by side. We talked about side by sides in the Delphi case. Well, this is even worse than that because you're attempting to connect someone's teeth to marks on a body. Not easy to do. But slowly the bite mark thing started to fall out of favor and it began to shift to look. What if a lot of these wounds were animal predation? And why is this important? Let's go ahead and talk about why this is important. So a huge chunk of the evidence in this case is Jesse Misskelley's confession. And one of the things that is critical to his confession that we've talked about from the very beginning of this is the notion that one of the boys, and only one of the boys was castrated. Remember, the bulletin went out that said all three of them were. Several suspects said that, but Jesse Misskelley said one of them was and he identified which one. And so that has been something that people who believe the West Memphis three are guilty have really hung their hat on, that Jesse Misskelley knew which one of them was castrated. And in fact, in a later confession known as the Bible confession, he goes into great detail about that event, far more detail than he does in the first confession. If that injury was not caused by a knife, but instead was predation, then Jesse Missgilly's confession, which is already unstable. It's unstable. There are a lot of problems with it. We're going to talk about those problems, but you can get past those problems if he has enough good information that he could not have known unless he was there. Because frankly, every confession is going to have holes like that. These are pretty big, but nevertheless. So it's already unstable. If you take that leg out from his confession, the whole thing collapses. If he's wrong about that, then I think pretty much, I would say, I hate to say everyone would agree because nobody ever agrees on anything but that his confession falls apart. So this is really important about whether or not A lot of these injuries were caused by animal predation. A lot of different experts have weighed in. Just to give you of an idea, the state positions, like a sort of overview. The state position is that the cause of death was multiple injuries to one of the boys and then drowning with multiple injuries for the other two. So Chris Byers dies of multiple injuries, you know, loss of blood, that sort of thing. He has a little bit of evidence of drowning, but not much. The other two have very strong evidence of drowning. So it seems like drowning sort of the primary cause of death for them. There were knives used on these boys and sticks and other things, and there's no animal predation. That is the theory of the state, the defense theory. You know, you had that initial one from Dr. Turvey where it shifts and he says he was drowning. Now, he actually did believe a knife was used, but he thought there were bite marks on one of the boys, as we talked about. And that was his big thing. So his move from the prosecution theory wasn't that great. And in fact, if you listen to what he says In Paradise Lost 2, some of it is really consistent with the prosecution's theory. When he talks about the wounds to Christopher Byers, I mean, he talks about it being a knife and the way he puts it, as you can see how the knife was used and you know, where it was stabbed in and all this other stuff. It was just for him. The bite mark was key because you could tie it to one of the parents. I don't think anyone really believes Turvey is right about anything anymore. At the time, he sort of gave something for everybody. But now he's fallen out of favor. So then the defense, West Memphis three becomes a big deal. Paradise Lost comes out, and you have all of these experts, famous people that you've heard of, Dr. Baden, Dr. Suvaran, Dr. Spitz. Just huge names in true crime and in forensics who come out and say these were not stabbings, these were drownings for all three. And there's a, you know, little bit of disagreement on some of that. But the vast majority, if not all of the serious wounds were caused by animal predation, not by a knife. So you have Spitz, Souvaron, you know, Suvaran, he used to be one of the best bite more people now. So that's another funny thing is you just see this all shift, right? Like he's put forward in the documentaries is like, this is the main guy on something like this. And now he's had to apologize, you know, about a bunch of Stuff. But anyways, you have these experts coming forward and saying, hey, they really. Yes, they were beaten, but they drown, and all their injuries were post mortem. So that's the setup. You have a bunch of experts come in and say, no, no knives used at all. All the serious wounds, some of the most gruesome wounds are animal predation. Doesn't limit the brutality of these murders because, remember, they were still beaten very severely. With one exception that we'll talk about. There is one expert who has a very strange view on this. And they were drowned. Right? So that's their position. And if that's right, then that blows a huge hole in the prosecution's theory. So we're going to talk about this more, but one thing I want you to do, and we're going to do some quotes from what they testified to. I want you to think about this critically because there's a tendency, and we talked about this before, to just defer to experts. You know, an expert said it was turtle predation, so therefore it's predation. And if you want to disagree, well, you got to disagree with Dr. Spitz. Don't do that. These guys obviously know a lot about what they're talking about. And you should heavily weigh the things they say, but also engage your brain when you listen to it. Dr. Spitz, in particular, we're going to talk about some things he says, and I want you to consider what he says and think whether or not what he is saying is consistent with your experience life. Okay, I gave myself a really long section, as we said. While some defense experts appear to have entirely ruled out a knife, and I would say the most recent ones are very much in that camp. There is evidence that there was a knife at the scene. Whether it was used on the boys or not, there definitely was a knife. How do we know that? Because one of the ligatures, particularly one of the ones on Michael Moore, was actually made from one shoelace that was cut in half. So all the other boys were tied with one shoelace, but one shoelace was cut in half to use on Michael Moore. I would guess that was probably the very first ligature tied, because I think whoever did this, they cut that in half and then they realized it'd be better to use the whole shoelace. I have plenty and I use the rest there. But you can see that they had a knife. Now, this is 1993. That's not necessarily that significant. Doesn't necessarily mean the knife was used in the murder. Back then, everybody carried knives. Everybody I knew carried knives. Particularly in the South. So it's not surprising that somebody had a knife. But we know a knife was present at the scene whether or not it was used on the boys or not. Okay, so what does one expect to see when animal predation occurs, especially in water? We looked through a bunch of different papers on this to try and get a better idea of this from sort of independent sources. And I do want to read some of this to you because I think this will be interesting to you. Obviously, this stuff's pretty gruesome. You know, reading this stuff, there's. They always. You know, this podcast has. Unfortunately, I've had to see, like, some really terrible stuff. And when you look at this, it always has illustrations, usually with photographs of actual bodies. So don't go hunting this down unless you want to see that. But here's. Here's one quote from one of the papers we looked at. In some cases, the body will be floating on the surface, and the usual arthropod predators, such as blowfires and carrion beetles will have access to exposed tissue. Interestingly, in this case, not what happened. Right. Remember, the boys are pressed down into the mud, so there isn't any access to those kind of predators. The immersed portion of the body will be subject to different predators, according. Aquatic insects may alter the appearance and condition of the remains. Large animals such as turtles, large fish, and large crustaceans will cause tissue damage that in some cases may mimic trauma to the body. Smaller fishes, crabs, shrimps, and invertebrates prey on soft tissue and, if given the opportunity, can completely deflesh exposed parts of the body. Fish, turtles, and other animals may aggressively feed on remains. And in ocean environments, large carnivores such as sharks will create postmortem artifacts. It is not unusual for small fish crustaceans to gain access to the interior of the body through skin and soft tissue defects or even normal body orifices. So, in general, this is absolutely something you should look at whenever you find a body in an aquatic environment. There are a lot of different animals that are scavengers, and they will scavenge human bodies. The boys were in the water for about 15 hours, probably, give or take, right? That is long enough for predation to begin. Now, it is not necessarily the case that it would begin as soon as you might think, but you can see how this would happen. And one thing to think about, the boys are in this sort of offshoot of the water. And one thing people have noticed is that the damage to the bodies seems to increase the closer you get to ten mile Bayou. So if you look at how the bodies are arranged, you know, Christopher Byers is the closest to the entrance to Ten Mile Bayou. And what you can imagine happens here is you do have wounds to these boys. They go into the water, the blood's in the water. And what you have is not necessarily things that were living in that creek that's often dried up, but you have all these other animals, turtles, gar, fish, whatever, and they follow the blood to the bodies and they attack the first body they get to. And that's going to be the body of the most damage. And if you look at where the bodies are, that is what you see. So this is a mark in favor of this possibly being animal predation.
- [19:31]
Alice
So crustaceans leave circles like pits or craters when they feed on a body. You can imagine because of the way that their claws and different pincers work. Right. So if the face is available, they're going to go for it. In particular, this is probably not a surprise. The things that poke out and are available to essentially bite on lips, nose, ears. Now, to distinguish attacks from animal predation, you look to certain characteristics. So you look for lack of bleeding from bitten tissue, excepting small amount of extravasated blood, absence of active bleeding. Edema and erythema on the edges of the wounds are among these shared characteristics. So in a post traumatic death, open wounds may be the first target of scavengers. And within a very short time, precise identification of ante mortem wounds may become seriously complicated once the predation starts, as you can imagine, because it changes what the anti mortem wounds looked like.
- [20:43]
Brett
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- [21:40]
Sarah James McLaughlin
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- [23:03]
Brett
And when I say in depth, I'm talking about deep. Each listing features comprehensive information about the neighborhood, complete with a video guide. They also have details about local schools with test scores, state rankings and student to teacher ratio. They even have an agent directory with the sales history of each agent. So when it comes to finding a home, not just a house, this is everything you need to know all in1place.homes.com We've done your homework. And so I'll say this, there's a couple things about this that I think are worth pointing out. So if you have seen west of Memphis, they got like some crazy guy who raises snapping turtles and lets one of them bite him, right? And, and after he bites him, you know, he gets the turtle's mouth off and you look at the wound and then they show a picture of one of the boys, one of the winds on the boys, and it looks just like it. And it's like, wow, that looks really, really convincing. I was watching it with my wife and she was like, wow, that looks exactly the same. And it does. Interestingly, not the perfect comparator because that Guy's still alive, Right. So you're seeing a lot of things you wouldn't necessarily see if the wound is postmortem. I'll say this. If you do go into these books and these various papers and you look at these wounds, they do have a very distinct look. They look strange. They look, you know, they're not gruesome, which is a weird way to put it. And I think it's because you just don't have the blood. Right. So they're very strange. It's hard to describe them if you haven't seen them. And looking at them, I wondered, would one really mistake one for the other? Now, we have a unique situation here. Because the boys were in water, you may have had more blood than you would normally have. Right. The water would sort of create more pooling of blood and more blood on the wounds. But the other thing that's interesting, if, if the first target of scavengers is open wounds, then I think this actually becomes really difficult because just because you see animal predation and maybe see a lot of animal predation, that doesn't mean that the boys weren't wounded. Because where would you expect to see the animal predation? Wherever they were stabbed. Like if they were stabbed and put in the water and the animals attacked the body, what are they going to attack first? The areas that are bleeding, the areas that are already damaged. I think that makes this a lot more complicated than some people wanted to seem. Like just because you're seeing evidence of animal predation doesn't mean animal predation alone caused all the wounds.
- [25:40]
Alice
And of course, as you know, we care about timelines. So when is the peak time for marine animals to attack a body? Because as you can imagine, many animals are more active when it's warm, for example, and less active when it's cold. Well, the peak time is going to be May through November because of that warming water. According to one study on animal attacks, of 228 cases of predation by marine animals, 38 were to the eyes, 20 to the nose, 21 to the mouth, 21 to the ears, 12 to the lower jaw, 19 to the scalp, five to the neck. So about 136 of these 200 and 28 cases were to the facial region. Only four of those 228 cases were to the pelvic region.
- [26:33]
Brett
Now, one thing I'll say about this, that may be a distinction. Normally when you find a body in the water, they're wearing clothes. And normally they're not actually nude. So I think this is one of those things where the statistics are pretty striking initially, like very. The wounds we need to see don't seem to happen that often. But if people are wearing pants and underwear, maybe that's why you don't see those kind of wounds to those areas. Whereas the boys obviously are nude.
- [27:07]
Alice
And one thing I'll note as well, even if there are no wounds to the face, your face has the most openings to the inside of your body, right? That's why you get sick if you touch your face and whatnot, because those are the methods into your body. So even if you don't have wounds, and we read earlier that wounds attract these predators to start their predation. But you have your eyes, your ears, your nose, your mouth, which if you were going through the processes of dying, your body expels things that are on the inside of you that could draw in predators, whereas other orifices of your body less likely. Now, the chief expert the defense called, we said was Warner Spitz. Now, he's a famous guy, you may have heard of him before. He literally wrote the book on several areas of forensics. And over the last decade he became something of, well, a defense, shilling almost exclusively testifying for the defense and a variety of high profile trials. Now, ordinarily, in discussing Warner Spitz, people focus on his comments at the defense press conference, where he makes broad assertions about how none of the wounds are made by any kind of knife at all. He says that they're all animal predation. But if you look beyond the press conference, things get weird. Most of Spitz's testimony focuses not on turtles, but on dogs. So there's no theory here that the predation is by dogs, unlike in other cases like Karen Reed.
- [28:41]
Brett
And let me just say we're gonna give you some of this. This testimony is weird. Like he goes through this dog attack theory that he has and it's really strange. But because we talked about earlier, there was a pack of dogs that supposedly lived around Blue Beacon. So I don't know if that got in his head somehow or not, but he focuses so heavily on dogs. And it's funny to hear people talk about Warner Spitz and the animal predation theory because none of them talk about dogs, they all talk about turtles. Turtles is the go to, not dogs. Right, But Warner Spitz was all about dogs. And it's very strange. And it sort of, I think, goes to the difficulty here. When you're looking at these wounds, you don't have the bodies. Remember, they're all looking at pictures And I got to tell you, I don't know that I don't know how well documented all this was. But they're looking at pictures, they're trying to make these determinations a long time afterwards. And but Spitz, man, I will give it to him, he thinks it's dogs and he goes with it being dogs. But I think that's something for you guys to remember when you hear somebody say, well, Warner Spitz, leading expert, says it's animal predation, so it must be animal predation. Well, he doesn't say it's the kind of animal predation that I think most people want it to be.
- [29:52]
Alice
Right. So at the Rule 32 hearing, Spitz testified and it's very, very long. So we're not going to read all of it for you. You can certainly read his entire testimony, but here are some highlights of his statements. Like we said, the whole thing is available online. You can certainly go read it. But this might then turn into like, you know, a 95 part series if we read his entire testimony. So highlights. He says, quote, if you take all of the injuries together, this is a mutilation, post mortem mutilation after death, mutilation by animals. Okay, so far, fitting into that, maybe even turtle theory. But then he goes on to say, basically within the same breath he says large animals, dogs I think, do this with their paws.
- [30:40]
Brett
Yeah, he shows, he shows in one of the injuries and he claims it's like a dog paw injury. I mean, I guess it's just strange. Like he's very focused on these dogs and he keeps going. He says the totality of the injuries here really leaves no doubt that this is the teeth of a dog, of a large animal. And when I say dog, I don't mean dog specifically. It could be a coyote, a canine type animal. So coyote, I mean, I guess if they have wolves in Westminsters, could be one of those dogs, dingoes, I don't know. He thinks it's some sort of canine. And he then goes on, he's shown pictures that people have said are the serrated knife. So you remember if you've watched the trial, and I don't remember if we've gone over this or not, and frankly we're so far into this now that some of this information you probably needed to pick up from like the documentation stuff because there's so much. But in closing, one of the prosecutors, Fogelman, he takes a grapefruit and he takes the knife. And he takes the knife and he like whacks it against the grapefruit it's very strange because I can't imagine anyone actually doing what he does to a human being, or a grapefruit, for that matter. But he whacks it against the grapefruit, and it makes some marks that are similar to some of the marks on one of the bodies. He says they're exactly the same. Experts have come in and say they're not the same at all. But whatever it was, sort of. It was a demonstrative that he was doing in closing argument. Take it for what it's worth. But it's been something people have talked about, and obviously these experts are looking at that too. So Warner Spitz says when he's asked about these injuries, he says, well, they're not from a serrated knife for the simple reason that they are something else. That something else is the paw of a large animal. So he's back to this paw thing. So he thinks the serrations are actually the paw of a dog, I guess, scratching. Now, I think the better argument, if you're into the predation thing, is just to go back to the snapping turtles. Snapping turtles have big paws, too, and they have big claws. And you could imagine the snapping turtle grabbing onto the body with its large claws, holding the body and taking bites. That's how you could imagine it, doing it. That makes a lot of sense. I don't know if Spitz just didn't have any familiarity with turtles or what, but he keeps going. And it only gets weirder because he is going to say that not only are the injuries that we've been talking about caused by dogs, but all the injuries, including the injuries that appear to be beatings, are caused by dogs. So let me read this part to you. These children were in an environment where such injuries will occur as the result of the animal predation and the knocking against trees or hard surfaces in that location where the bodies were located until they died from the person. Dying here is a process. It's not an instantaneous event. During that process, there was injury inflicted to these kids both in the process of dying and also subsequently. Many of the injuries don't show any bleeding because they were sustained after death. Some of the injuries show minor type bruising. Some show a little more bruising, and some show a little less. But none of the injuries are the kind that would have caused death in and of themselves. So he's got this whole theory that. And he's got more. I'm gonna read more what he says that the dogs attacked the boys and started smashing them against trees and Stuff.
- [33:57]
Alice
So much so that like a skull got punched out.
- [34:00]
Brett
Yeah. And, and what's wild about this is he eventually says that the boys all died of drowning, but the manner of death, we talked about this before. There's cause of death and there's manner of death. Right. So the cause of death is drowning. In Spitz's mind, the manner of death is undetermined. He was not willing to say that this was a homicide. And I don't know if he actually, I mean, obviously it's not possible for. I mean the dogs didn't.
- [34:29]
Alice
Right. They don't, they don't have opposable thumbs. They might be able to punch out a skull by knocking you against a tree. I don't actually think that, but they certainly didn't use opposable thumbs to tie these knots.
- [34:39]
Brett
And look, I mean, some of this is almost irrelevant to whether or not it's animal predation. But I do think it's really important that the main expert, sort of the chief guy that is always put forward seems to be completely off his rocker in this case. I'm just going to keep going. So he gets asked about the fact that some of the injuries do show hemorrhaging, they do show bleeding, which would seem to indicate that they're pre mortem, that they're before they died or perimortem, I can't remember which one they, which term you doctors use. So he's asked to explain, like how is this. He says these kids have injuries which indicate predation by large animals. Large animals grab and shake. They shake against something or they shake in the air. Under the circumstances of this case, it would be wrong to say, well, they were punched in the face, but the dogs came later and bit the cheek and sucked the blood and came out of these wounds from the left cheek and left a raw surface, etc. Etc. And then fish came, injured the eyelids. So you have to take it all together. If you take it any differently, you make mistakes. And this is just bizarre. And I frankly just don't really take anything Spitz says seriously about this case given this sort of obsession with the dogs. Now, like I said, this test, we are to a certain extent cherry picking this testimony because it's hundreds of pages long. It's available in Callahan. If you want to read his entire testimony, go ahead and do it. Just know there's much more about these dogs too, so worth maybe looking at. But just to say the dog theory that he puts forward I think is completely wrong. Whether or not there was animal predation or not. The dog theory is wild and is not what happened in this case.
- [36:22]
Alice
Yeah, it's really bizarre, especially when he's a famous name. I've certainly heard it in this context, in another context as well. And you have to truly see what he's saying and how it's being used to basically prop up the animal predation theory. Because this is not even what he's testifying to. So for what it's worth, though, to be fair to him, Spitz would later testify that he believed all the damage to Christopher Byers genital area occurred at once. So the predator tore away the scrotum and in doing so, essentially de gloved the penis. Remember how it was skinned. And even in discussing this possibility, Spitz goes back to talking about dogs and cats and possibly a coyote, not turtles. So essentially what he's saying is one foul suit, like everything that was done to Christopher Byers genital area. Remember back to the autopsy, all the different indentations, what seemed like different stabbings or knife wounds. And even if you think it's animal predation, he still goes back to saying it's animals and dogs. And I think the theory that we've been hearing about animal predation is it's turtles. They're snapping turtles. So it would have been once they're in the water, remember where they were in the water, not floating on top, but rather suctioned into the mud where they stayed until they were dislodged. So the coyote or the cats or the dogs would have had to, like, find their way to the mud in order to be able to rip off part of the genitals and de glove the rest, which is kind of a strange way for the skin to tear apart. To be honest. This is just a. That's a bizarre testimony to me.
- [37:57]
Brett
I mean, here's the thing about this. I think there's something very attractive about this theory, even though it's crazy, right? Like, this seems very bizarre. It seems bizarre for a couple reasons. I mean, number one, it seems bizarre that it would happen. It seems bizarre that the animal would not continue like once did this. Then you have even more bleeding, you have even more exposed skin, that the animal would not continue to sort of go after this area. But Peretti's explanation just doesn't seem possible. It does not seem possible that someone took a knife and did this. It just doesn't feel like you could do this in any way intentionally with a knife. And he, like he said, he even said it would be difficult for him to do that in A lab. So the whole degloving theory becomes something that actually, I don't know, it feels like maybe it's possible. One thing I would be curious about, and I don't know that anyone's ever thought about this, is it possible that whoever did this, like, let's assume it was a person with a knife and they did a castration, but that essentially they did the same thing the turtle did, they began the castration, but they didn't cut all the way through, and then they yanked the organ away and in doing so, deglove the penis. Is that something that a person attacking someone in this way, in a struggle, in a violent struggle could do? I would think if a turtle could do it, a human could do it too, but I've never heard that discussed. And so I just don't know. But the degloving thing to me feels a little bit more likely, a lot more likely than the idea that someone out there in the forest with a buck knife did this. That has always been something that I could never reconcile. Like, the damage is there, but how is it possible? And honestly, the degloving theory, I think, is the only theory that works if it's animal predation, because an animal wouldn't do that either, right? Like, so it had to have been something very strange and one in a million that happened here for this kind of way to have occurred.
- [40:08]
Alice
We'll ask Joseph Scott Morgan tomorrow this, but I wonder if you can even de. Glove. Right. Like, I, I'm about to lose some listeners here, but like, if you've ever worked on a farm and skinned animals, you don't just tear it off. There actually has to be something that separates the skin. And so even if it were brute force, brute force would actually tear away the soft tissue, the actual genitals, along with the skin, rather than separate the skin without some sort of slicing effect to separate those. Right. And so I don't even know. And I, I don't know if Joseph Scott Morgan will know, but that's going to be a question I ask, is that even possible without some sort of slicing device to separate the skin from the tissue? Now, what about Dr. Peretti, the only doctor to actually see the bodies? We've talked about this. Everyone else and lots of medical experts have had opinions over the years, but they've all. But Peretti have been looking at pictures now of all the people who testified at the Rule 37 hearing. Ironically, it was Peretti who probably had the most experience with animal predation. So it turned out that Dr. Peretti, and you literally can't make this up, he bred and raised turtles and tortoises completely separate from his like medical training. This was just his background, right? He was like made for this if he was indeed going to have some sort of expertise on, you know, if there was animal predation. So he'd been raising turtles since he was 5 years old and he had 200 turtles of his own. So this is not just some like hobby horse on the side. This is some serious tortoise raising. And he had eight different species, including a 17 year old snapping turtle. Peretti, obviously we know that he testified at the trial, doesn't believe that what happened to the boys was turtle predation. And he still sticks by his original findings. Now, he's not an animal predation expert, but he may be more of an expert than a lot of these other people who have put forth their animal predation theories with respect to dogs, cats and turtles, and specifically turtles, because of his own experience with a variety of turtles and specifically a kind that was found in the waters where the boys were found.
- [42:27]
Brett
Guys, we want to talk about one of our favorite podcast, Silver Linings Handbook. And you know, we love it because we've been on it several times. Jason Blair is the host and he is one of the best interviewers in the business. And he's not just talking to flashy people and podcasters and those sorts of boring types like Alice and I. He's talking to people who are really involved in these cases, like Kimberly Loring. We covered the case of Ashley Loring, heavy runner, a 20 year old native woman who went missing near Browning, Montana. And Jason gave Kimberly the opportunity to give her sister a voice and call on those responsible for her disappearance to bring her home. And that's the kind of thing you're going to hear on Jason's podcast. Silver Linings Handbook has the best interviews, the best conversations, and always gets to the heart of what is most important in true crime. And, and that is the victims and the people seeking justice.
- [43:22]
Sarah James McLaughlin
It's true. This podcast has something for everyone. The areas that Jason focuses on have included, well, being, mental health, law and criminal justice system, true crime, religion, society. Truly anything that is interesting that can inspire, he covers. And what we feel makes the podcast different is that it's really not scripted at all. Jason uses the same natural curiosity you would have sitting in the living room or around a campfire with a new and exciting person you had just met. Jason is a former journalist who worked at the New York Times, the Boston Globe, The Washington Post and other newspapers. You'll quickly see how this weekly podcast of interesting people in interesting walks of life, that these are conversations that inspire and interesting conversations with interesting people. You've got to listen today. Brett and I do all the time. So subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever think about switching insurance companies to see if you could save some cash? Progressive makes it easy. Just drop in some details about yourself and see if you're eligible to save money. When you bundle your home and auto prices. The process only takes minutes and it could mean hundreds more in your pocket.
- [44:33]
Brett
Visit progressive.com after this episode to see if you could save Progressive Cashly insurance company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states. Yeah, it's just wild that the whole theory is that it's turtles. And he's a turtle expert. He was the president of, like, the Arkansas Turtle Society. It has some fancy, you know, Latin name or whatever that I don't remember. But I mean, he's probably more qualified as a turtle expert than he is as a doctor, particularly given some of his findings. But he obviously says it wasn't turtles. I don't know. People have tried to recreate this and they've done experiments to try and show that this is possible. They've used chickens and pig carcasses. Does this work? You know, this is one of those things where experimentation is helpful, but you always have to remember the distinction between what you're doing and what you're trying to figure out. So human bodies are not bait. Right. You're not hanging them from a rope in the water, you know, with a hook through them or whatever, for all the animals to come and eat at. That's not what happened in this case. You had the bodies that were pressed down in the mud. They were still in the water, but not in the way that these experiments would have been conducted. And the other thing is, presumably, and I don't know how these people did these experiments, I assume that they got. They probably got some, you know, chickens from the local supermarket and, you know, a pig carcass from the local slaughterhouse. I don't know exactly how they did it. You know, maybe they got a whole pig. That would be the better way to do it, by the way, because otherwise you're going to just have meat essentially, which is prepped for cooking and eating everything else. You throw that in the water, it's going to attract animals even faster. So I would really like real scientific experiments here, would Be interesting to see actual people try and construct as closely as possible to what happened, the conditions and see how it goes. You know, the fact that the boys are pressed down in the mud is a problem. It's impossible and this is nothing. It's like everything else. I feel like every episode we say this. It is impossible to know exactly how the bodies were in the mud. It seems as though they were all pressed face down into the mud with their hands tied to their feet, behind their bodies. If that's true, then it's more difficult to believe. A lot of the damage to the front of their bodies occurred because of these turtles, because their bodies would have been down in the mud and maybe you would have seen other kinds of predation, but the turtles in particular seems a little less likely.
- [47:09]
Alice
I know we're looking at this from a very clinical perspective, but to think that these boys faces were smashed into the mud is horrific. That's not lost on us at all. And one thing, I don't think it was dogs that did it, by the way, that pressed them into the mud. It would make sense if what you're trying to achieve, we said this in a few episodes back, is to create that suction, right? Because they don't have clothes on. So you can't really pin clothes down anywhere. It makes sense because guess which side of your body, if you had to pick a side, front, back, right, left, has the most basically indentations to be able to create suction, right? Think about literally a suction cup. Why it suctions is because there's pockets of holes. Your eyes, your mouth, your nose, your ears. This is your face has the most indentations of anywhere else in your body, essentially, right? So it makes sense to be pressed down in that way. Also ensures that no one's going to survive it, of course.
- [48:02]
Brett
So at the end of the day, what do we make of this, everybody? As I said earlier, I feel like the camps in this case are very much 100% one way or the other. Either this was entirely every single wound was caused by a knife, they were all done intentionally, or every single wound is animal predation, whether it's dogs or turtles or whatever. And I just wonder if there couldn't have been some in between here where some of the wounds you're seeing are what are drawing the animals to those particular areas, and then you are seeing animal predation. One of the most important things here is whether or not there was hemorrhage in these wounds. And this is one of the problems I have with the Autopsy, Because I feel like you feel like you should go back and read it, be able to read it and know the answer. Like, oh, well, obviously this wasn't animal predation, because there's all this blood. Doesn't do a very good job documenting that. So if we knew for a fact every single injury and whether or not there was hemorrhaging, whether or not there was bleeding, we would have a really good idea here. But we don't know that. I'm hoping that when we talk to Justice Scott Morgan, he can give us a little bit, maybe he reads something into that autopsy that we're not seeing and it'll explain some of this. But I am very curious to see what he says. Okay, finally, there is the lake knife itself. And I'm gonna put this on the screen. If you're watching, know that technically this is an image of one of the boys, but it's one wound on one of the boys. I mean, it's a wound on a child. So it's gruesome into. There's that, but it's not particularly gruesome. But if you don't want to see it, don't look at your screen. Okay. I think it's worth looking at for those of you who want to compare the size of the lake knife and this particular injury. So there's this lake knife, and in the base of the lake knife, there at one time was something probably a compass, but it's not in there anymore. So you essentially have this circular base. And many people have said or speculated that the lake knife matches a wound, one of the wounds over Stevie Branches eyes. So this is what Homer Campbell said. He's one of the experts who is in more of the prosecution position. I believe the injury to the left forehead and upper lid of the left eye were produced by the knife are covered or one similar. There's another expert, Peter Loomis, who said the circular mark looks like the butt of the survival knife. The measurements fit. The diameter of the injury is 30 millimeters. And the diameter of the prominent circular area of the butt of the knife is 29.8 millimeters. So I'm going to go ahead and put it on the screen for those of you who are here. Okay. So you can see here the measurement of the knife. You can see the wound. This wound, by the way, is the wound or one of the most prominent wounds that people thought was a bite mark. It is right over one of Stevie Branch's eyes. Just as an aside, it's a strange place for you to Have a bite mark. Even looking at where killers tend to bite their victims, this is sort of a strange place. But you can see why you would think that particularly on the lower part, it almost looks like teeth marks. Right. And I think that's where it comes from. The big problem with this, very few people have an X tooth in the middle of their mouth. And this wound has a very defined wound in the center, which looks like an X. And the theory in this is that if you had that compass in the base of the late knife at the time of the murders, that in the middle you're going to have a raised pin where that holds like the little arrow that spins around in the compass and that that could have been what made the X in the middle of the wound. As I said, some people have said this is a human bite mark. The position now of the pro west Memphis three people is that this is some sort of animal predation. Peretti actually thought it looked like it could have been made by a belt buckle, which frankly, I can see that too. The X in the middle really makes it look like some sort of mechanical wound. Not one made by teeth.
- [52:04]
Alice
Yeah. So looking at this, if you're looking at the wound, the X mark or the middle of that wound is sitting right on top of like an eyebrow. You can see, like the hairs on the eyebrow. If you feel your brow, the reason you have hair there, there is a brow bone, right. And right. It's near the end outside wing of the eyebrow, where if you feel yourself, you can feel a brow bone. And it's usually raised in most people. The reason it's raised is because your eyebrows shield dust and things from falling into your eyes. That's why it's slightly raised, to give it a ledge. And if it were a bite mark, and I don't think it's a bite mark, if this were a bite, you can imagine what happens is you bite around the raised ridge, which would actually create more of the indentations on the top and bottom and leave the middle actually squeezed loose and not leave a mark there. Let's say you had a weird X tooth in the middle of your. Or a tongue ring or something. Something within the mouth to create that. Actually, it feels like the pressure of creating that bite would come in contact with the ridge and leave the middle part where we currently see the X or the cross or the middle indentation so loose that it wouldn't be as prominent of a mark as the surrounding area. Leading me to believe or to think that this doesn't look Like a bite mark, but rather, if you think of flattening something against the brow, if it's raised, it works in the opposite way of what a bite does. Right. Instead of loosening the skin around the brow bone, the brow bone now becomes a ridge that is an equal and opposite force behind your skin to create more of an indentation if something were going flat against your face rather than biting, essentially pulling skin away from your face.
- [53:51]
Brett
And I honestly can't believe anyone ever thought this was a human bite mark, because I just. I'm with you 100%. I just. I don't know how anyone ever thought that. You can say what you want to about Peretti, but his theory of a belt buckle is so much better than a bite mark. And just to be clear here, if it's a belt buckle, that doesn't mean anything, right? I mean, it could be anybody who left that. So it's not like you need it to be a bite mark for the West Memphis Three to be innocent. I will say this. Nothing else about the knife really matches much as far as I'm concerned. I'm not convinced by the grapefruit demonstration. This is by far more convincing evidence that a knife was used than anything to do with the blade itself. Right. You could totally imagine someone smashing someone in the face with the butt of the knife and it leaving exactly this kind of wound. So I don't know. But yeah, that X does. That doesn't come in nature. I don't say that's coming in nature. So I think, I think this is definitely caused by something that is not an animal. Well, look, we could talk about animal predation for a long time. As I said, the post conviction review, there's a lot of focus on this real effort to prove this was all animal predation. I think you got the idea. I think if this is animal predation, it's turtles. It's not dogs, it's turtles. And I think there were absolutely turtles in the area. When we were going over some of the facts earlier, we talked about how kids saw turtles there. Part of the area is called Turtle Hill. It's a water course in the South. They're going to be turtles. Snapping turtles are vicious, massive prehistoric animals. You know, they are terrifying creatures. I could totally imagine them doing something like this. The problem I have is I don't see it is anywhere near as definitive as some people do. Like at this point, it's almost just become assumed that all the wounds were animal predation. And maybe they were, but I'm not necessarily Seeing it. I need a little bit more. Maybe we'll get some more of that in our next episode. But do I think it's viable theory? Absolutely. Do I think there probably was animal predation? Yeah, I think there was animal predation no matter what.
- [55:51]
Alice
Yeah, I think after. But you know, what we read in that kind of medical journal previously is this makes complete sense, right? This is the fear of everyone after watching Jaws, you know, is that you'll have some sort of minor wound and then the blood attracts a predator, and then once they come doing their animal predation, you no longer can even tell what the original wound was because they've done so much damage. I can totally see that. And I would almost expect it because of the horrendous beating that the boys suffered before being put in the water.
- [56:21]
Brett
I mean, remember, we have the luminol test that was done and after doing this podcast, I'm no longer clear on how accurate luminol is, but nevertheless, he had luminol. It was lighting up in the places you would expect it to light up if it was lighting up on blood. So you have some circumstantial evidence to support that's what it is. There clearly was blood at the crime scene. Given the wounds, you would expect there to be blood the dogs did not cause.
- [56:45]
Alice
I was gonna say there wasn't luminol lighting up all over the trees where the dogs were apparently shaking them against the trees to punch out a skull.
- [56:53]
Brett
So there was blood. And when they went in the water, there would have been blood in the water. Remember, there was the one searcher who said that the whole bayou smelled like blood when he went into it. Now, maybe that's just sort of in his mind when he realized what happened. He now believes that to be true. And he didn't actually smell that, but that's what he said and it would make sense. So you would expect animals to be drawn to that. So I think you're going to have animal predation. And the problem here, I don't know that Peretti did the kind of in depth analysis he needed to do at the time to distinguish between what probably was some animal predation and what might have been the other injuries. And that's constant throughout this case. And I think one of the reasons this case remains so famous and so debated is because there's really just not a lot there for us to grab onto. We're all arguing about shadows, right? We're putting our own spin on it, but we don't have a lot of facts to be going on. I feel like this is just another area where the investigation itself was shoddy. This should have been an incredibly detailed autopsy that really laid out exactly what happened to these boys that would allow us to make these kind of distinctions. And probably I should have identified what is probably actually animal predation, but didn't do that. And so we're now left in this world where we're doing the best we can with what we have. And that's frustrating for me, and it's probably frustrating for you, too. Okay, so we got one more episode where we're going to talk about this, and then hopefully we will move on from the most brutal part of this case for a while. Obviously, we're going to talk about some of the injuries when we get to the confession in this case. But the really brutal part of this case, which I think is worth remembering always exactly what these boys went through. And I think that is true. No matter what you think about the animal predation theory, don't let that make you feel like this murder wasn't as brutal as it was, because it absolutely was. Even if some of the injuries were.
- [58:50]
Alice
Caused by animals, all of those injuries to the skull, all three skulls essentially smashed in, animal predation could have followed, but that was done by a human, a horrendous human.
- [59:01]
Brett
Okay, well, we're gonna go ahead and call it a day for now. Alice is a little under the weather, and we want her to be able to recover. Alice, get the to a physician. That's what you need to do. So that's our. She apparently has been texting with her doctor while we're recording.
- [59:18]
Alice
So I really have been, thanks to the, like, 150 of y' all who have been yelling at me in the chat to go to the doctor. I totally wasn't going to go to the doctor. I can't remember the last time I went to the doctor, like, for not having a baby. So this is the first time. And it's because you all were yelling at me to do so. And I can hear myself now a little bit through this headphone, and I'm like, I sound pretty bad.
- [59:40]
Brett
Well, all right. Well, our next episode should be really interesting. I can't wait to talk to Joseph Scott Morgan from Body Bags. Great podcast. If you're not listening to it, you should. If you have thoughts on this or anything else, shoot us an email prosecutors pod gmail.com@ ProsecutorsPod for all your social media. Join us on the gallery to discuss this and anything else you want to talk about. Follow us on TikTok, Instagram, whatever. We are there if you want to recommend a case. The email is the best way to do it. Otherwise, we will see you everywhere else on the Internet. If you want to watch us record these episodes, you can join Patreon for as little as $3 a month. And if you don't really want to watch us record them, but you want to hear them without ads and get them a little early, you get that as well for as little as $3 a month on Patreon. Okay, guys, well, we will be back next time, but until then, hello, I'm Brett.
- [60:35]
Alice
And I'm Alice.
- [60:36]
Brett
And we are the prosecutor. Okay.
- [61:00]
Alice
Ah, Renee's gonna help me? I don't know. I think I probably have to.
- [61:04]
Brett
I've been sick for, like, two weeks. She's coughing all the time.
- [61:07]
Alice
It's been two weeks. I can't breathe deeply, but it's okay. I also can't hear very well.
- [61:18]
Brett
Right?
- [61:18]
Alice
There's, like. Not that there's fluid in my ears, but, like, everything's, like, up here. And so I was talking to my son tonight, and he's like, why are you yelling? And I was like, am I? Oh, all right. Someone's asking your favorite Texas roadhouse, Sam.
- [62:34]
Brett
I mean, I typically get a steak is what I typically get, because that's why. So I went to. I wanted a place I could go and just get easy steak. Right? This is years ago, and I went to Outback because I remember Outback being really good. The Outback has really fallen off.
- [62:57]
Alice
And then I used to be good. I was at an outback when a tornado hit when I moved to Texas. Sav.
- [63:36]
Brett
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